EDITORIAL; The Truth About Charley

Published: April 10, 2011

Bill Steigerwald has made an intriguing, if disheartening, discovery that seems to have eluded admirers and scholars of John Steinbeck for decades. Steinbeck's ''Travels With Charley in Search of America'' is shot through with dubious anecdotes and impossible encounters.

Mr. Steigerwald, a former newspaperman, said he was planning to pay respectful tribute last year when he retraced Steinbeck's 1960 journey -- 10,000 miles from Long Island to Maine to California and back. But as he explained in a blog and an article in this month's Reason magazine, facts got in the way.

He checked the book against Steinbeck's actual itinerary, letters from the road, the book's draft and revisions. They convinced him that Steinbeck misrepresented dates and places and had not spent all that time alone with his dog. His wife, Elaine, was along for most of the trip; they often stayed in deluxe hotels and camped hardly at all.

This might not flabbergast anyone who has read the book lately. It is full of improbably colorful characters and hard-to-swallow dialogue straight out of a black-and-white 1960s TV show. ''What's the matter with you, Mac, drunk?'' says a red-faced New York cop. ''You can just rot here,'' says a forlorn young man in the Rockies who wears a polka-dot ascot and dreams of being a beautician in New York. ''Flops. Who hasn't known them hasn't played,'' says a traveling Shakespearean actor in North Dakota.

One especially incredible melodrama is set in New Orleans. It is a meditation on racism with a scary white bigot, a white moderate and two emblematic African-Americans: a timid, weather-beaten field hand and a bold young student who is tired of the boycotts and sit-ins.

It is irritating that some Steinbeck scholars seem not to care. ''Does it really matter that much?'' one of them asked a Times reporter.

Steinbeck insisted his book was reality-based. He aimed to ''tell the small diagnostic truths which are the foundations of the larger truth.'' Books labeled ''nonfiction'' should not break faith with readers. Not now, and not in 1962, the year ''Travels With Charley'' came out and Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for literature.